Even Windows’s built-in ID3 tagging allows for multiple artists on a track.
This might be the clearest explanation on this topic yet.
But I think we’ll see flying pigs before the Plex developers listen to their customers and implement this feature.
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It’s not about the tags. FLAC/Vorbis, MP4 and MP3/id3v2.4 can all store multiple artists for 20+ years. Musicbrainz stores multiple artists too.
This is purely due to the complexity of reworking the old Plex database & API design, it would be a breaking change for the server + all clients. If you don’t design multi-valued fields in your data structure/API from the beginning, it’s very hard to rework the code at a later stage. Plex has never really done any radical changes to its data model or codebase in almost 16+ years, I don’t expect anything soon.
Support for multiple Genres and Release Types is now kind-of hacked in, but the functionality is different, you can only filter on it, there’s no “Hip-Hop” genre page you can navigate to, like with Artists.
Apple Music is struggling with the same problem btw, since it’s based on a decades-old design going back to 2001. The Subsonic API doesn’t support multiple artists either, although the new OpenSubsonic API extension now does. DJ software like Rekordbox, Serato, Djay Pro, EngineDJ - none of them support multiple artists either. Multi-valued fields in databases are a headache for developers, so they’ll try the hardest to avoid them.
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But what I can confirm now is that Plexamp can recognize tracks with multiple artists. If a track has multiple artists and the artist fields are edited in the correct format, in Plexamp, you can navigate to the pages of all associated artists through this track. Although the track and album won’t be displayed on the other artists’ pages, you can at least navigate to the associated artists from this track. If other Plex clients can achieve this, it would be a significant improvement.
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I understand that implementing this change on the back-end is challenging. It’s clear why there might be hesitation. However, considering there has been a forum topic on this issue for nearly a decade, with numerous (paying) users expressing their concerns about the missing functionality, perhaps it’s time to address it.
At the very least, a statement or update would be appreciated, as many users currently feel unheard.
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This is a Plexamp client-side only “hack” (which indeed works quite well, but with limitations):
- the Plex server can store only 1 Artist value, say “Alice feat. Bob”.
- Plexamp takes this string, recognises “feat.” is a separator, so separates it client-side into “Alice” and “Bob”
- it does a text string search for both these artists so it can show links to both artists. If you have artists with the same name (I have for example two artists named Ghost), Ghost will show twice, Plexamp cannot know which one the track belongs to.
A number of caveats:
- this works only for track Artist, not Album Artist.
- only in Plexamp, not Plex Web or the various Plex apps
- the PMS scanner doesn’t support multiple value tags, so if the song has two Artist values, only the first value is read (so a file tagged with “Alice”, “Bob” will only have “Alice”)
- the Plex scanner only supports a few separator values: it will split “Alice feat. Bob” and “Alice, Bob” but not “Alice;Bob” or “Alice mit Bob”
- only Artists that have an album in your library are shown as links. If you have 3 tracks with, say, Snoop Dogg as track artist, but no albums by him, the links don’t show.
- you need an exact text match, artists with different spellings (such as Jay Z and Jay-Z) will not get matched on Musicbrainz ID like albums.
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Please add multi-artist support!
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I see that we are making our way through a 4 year old request (TVDB alternate season ordering) can we look at this almost decade old request?
How about plex,inc acknowledging that more than one artist can exist on a music track?
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Bumping again in the hopes that someone at plex,inc understands that more than one artist can exist on a track.
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For me this missing feature is the only reason, why I don’t buy a plex lifetime pass.
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Same for me…
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This is the only thing keeping me from pulling the trigger on a lifetime Plex Pass. Please prioritize this request
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Bumping. More and more songs are being released as singles and with multiple artists.
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Doing my part to bump…Plexamp could be leagues easier to navigate by implementing this single change. Collaborative albums and split EPs have been around for like a century. If I go to Kanye West’s page I should see Watch The Throne there. If I go to Jay-Z’s page I should see Watch The Throne there. There is no artist in real life called “Kanye West;Jay-Z” so there shouldn’t be an artist page for it.
Additionally, if this feature would be implemented, you could also set it so that any track where an artist is listed but is NOT one of the album artists, it could be listed as a feature on that artist’s page. How cool would it be to have an artist page that includes every single track they have performed on, regardless of whether they are the primary artist?
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Just bumping this again, and again reiterating I’d pay a bounty for this feature.
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Bump. I also would be willing to pay a bounty.
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Whole Indian movie music is historically comprising of albums with multiple tracks sung by multiple artists per track. There is a composer/producer who creates this music and there are actors who feature in them. With out support for multiple artists and properly parsing other meta data, plex music is pretty cumbersome to use with huge swath of Indian music. Spotify and Apple music handles it pretty grace fully and efficiently. This is one thing that is keeping me away from pulling trigger on plex pass.
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Yeah same for me, it’s the only thing preventing me from going with a plex pass.
I’m also, just like many others, looking into alternatives.
I think it’s a joke that the plex team doesn’t even provide a statement on this topic.
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I just realized that Plexamp actually supports multi-artist albums.
For example, the album “Love for Sale” on MusicBrainz lists both Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga as artists.
Since Plex only allows adding one artist when managing the library, I added “Tony Bennett” (if I added “Tony Bennett & Lady Gaga,” the artist would not be matched). As a result, this album only appears on Tony Bennett’s page in the Plex app.
However, in Plexamp, not only can you see this album on Tony Bennett’s page, but you can also find it in the “Appears On” section of Lady Gaga’s page. Plexamp seems to pull data from the backend via MusicBrainz and recognizes that Lady Gaga is also credited as an album artist, so it lists the album on Lady Gaga’s page as well.
That being said, if you go into the “Love for Sale” album and click on “More,” under “Go to Artist,” you will still only see “Tony Bennett.” I believe this is because I only entered “Tony Bennett” as the album artist in my database.
So, the current situation in Plexamp is:
Multi-artist albums can be displayed on each artist’s page (artists other than the album artist appear in the “Appears On” section), but the album details are only linked to one album artist.
Multi-artist tracks are not displayed on each artist’s page (the corresponding album only appears on the album artist’s page), but every artist can be linked in the track details.
In other words, Plexamp currently supports showing albums associated with multiple artists on the artist’s page (if the album has multiple artists in the metadata provider’s data), but it does not support displaying tracks associated with multiple artists. I hope that in the future, Plexamp will also support showing collaborative tracks on the artist’s page.
Moreover, I hope the multi-artist features supported in Plexamp can be applied to all Plex apps.
Additionally, turning album artists and track artists into tags should be a great solution to this issue.
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Adding my own support bump. It would improve Artist view tremendously to be able to see a “Featured On” with links to albums that are by a different artist or “Various Artists” and are either tagged with the viewed artist, or have any tracks tagged with the viewed artist. Even being able to do this manually in the “tags” interface would be a boon. Then including them in the “Artist” shuffle (again either by entire album if the album is tagged, or only tagged songs if the song is tagged) would be possible.
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